Classification of Application Development for FPGA-Based Systems

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have been used to accelerate DoD-related applications with promising performance. However, current development tools require significant hardware knowledge and are not amenable to the increasing complexity of FPGA-based systems. The application requirements are expected to change dramatically for future use cases, and require a well defined development methodology. This paper presents the results obtained after conducting an extensive survey and study about current FPGA tools. A classification for DoD use cases and FPGA tools is provided. This classification provides the current status of the available tools and identifies current tool limitations for DoD use cases.